Three WOLVERINEs flew into Damascus International via the intermittent Syrian Air flight from Algiers, posing as representatives of the Polish Business Board looking for business opportunities in new urban-renewal projects, a cover that was marginally plausible given the growing devastation of the suburbs of Damascus. Two other WOLVERINEs, including Forsyth’s friend Witold, traveled by jeep from Lebanon and staged in Jdeidat Yabous, a Syrian town forty-five kilometers west of Damascus. It was three kilometers from the Lebanese border, the official border crossing. Witold and his colleague arrived in a white Toyota Land Cruiser with the logo of Heritage for Peace on the door, a familiar organization dedicated to protecting World Heritage sites and antiquities in Syria. No locals paid them any attention.
After a desultory call on the Ministry of Housing and Construction, the WOLVERINEs in Damascus determined they were black and operated flawlessly. They located the house by geolocating the analysts’ cell phones in As Saboura with a CANINE unit, a CIA proprietary GPS-satellite tracking system, operated from an innocuous seven-inch tablet, and accurate to five meters. The exhausted analysts were shaken awake at four in the morning by VZWOLVERINE/4, the Polish ex-police sergeant who somehow had entered the little house without a sound. They were bundled into a waiting car and driven north on Highway One where they met Witold’s Toyota at dawn. Transferring to Witold’s vehicle, the CIA analysts were given khaki field shirts and jeans, floppy hats, desert boots, and Belgian passports. Witold then drove to the border, timing the crossing at noon when truck traffic was heaviest and potbellied customs officers were thinking about lunch. One of the Syrian customs men fingered the alias Belgian passport of one of the terrified analysts, and asked him a question in French, a language he did not speak. The swooning analyst instead threw up the remains of leek-and-lamb stew on the customs man’s boots. Witold ruefully explained that his colleague had drunk water from a stream below the last village, and had been sick for the last two hours. Shaking his head at the
The WOLVERINEs remained on active duty for another three years, but with their sponsor and advocate Tom Forsyth assigned abroad and then Headquarters-bound, they were eventually retired, and were paid their sizable annuities that had accrued over the years. There was an awkward awards ceremony in Headquarters during which the five WOLVERINEs were presented with individual Distinguished Service medals, a Meritorious Unit Citation, as well as engraved brass-and-wood mantel clocks with a world-time bezel and CIA logo on the face. The presenter who read the citations—she had been born the year Witold had eluded the guard dogs in the Kampinos Forest outside Warsaw—had a little trouble with the Polish names, but the Deputy Director had memorized
Thanks to their performance in Syria, Forsyth kept the WOLVERINEs on the reserve list, but there was only intermittent work, and they all eventually dispersed to comfortable if spiritless retirements. Three returned to Poland and their families. Agnes, the only woman of the network, was single, earthy, and still a wild child. She settled in Southern California, and found work restoring art at the Getty Museum. Witold, forever serious and driven, and chronically unmarried, chose to live in New York, where he occasionally did freelance security consulting.
